HONG KONG — Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce behemoth, reported on Tuesday a jump in profit in its first earnings announcement since its initial public offering in September.

Shrugging off a slowdown in the Chinese economy, Alibaba’s profit grew 16 percent from the same period a year earlier as the company’s sites benefited from the growing number of Chinese turning to the Internet to shop.

Shares in the company, China’s largest e-commerce retailer by transactions, have risen about 50 percent since it raised nearly $21.8 billion in the highly anticipated initial stock sale.

In a sign of the growing power of Chinese Internet companies, the listing surpassed the offering of Facebook, the American social media giant. Now with a market value of more than $250 billion, Alibaba is worth more than Facebook.

Pointing to a huge jump in the number of customers using Alibaba’s e-commerce sites on smartphones and to strong increases in sales and profits, the company’s executive vice chairman, Joseph C. Tsai, said in a news conference after the earnings announcement that the results provided a “strong foundation for future sustained growth.”

The Jefferies analyst Cynthia Meng agreed, estimating that Alibaba would count half of China’s 1.3 billion people as customers over the next decade, up from less than a quarter now. A large increase in the number of Chinese shopping online will help Alibaba overcome a slowdown in the growth of Chinese Internet users and moderating economic expansion, Ms. Meng said.

Alibaba said that in the quarter ended Sept. 30, its net profit jumped to $1.1 billion, roughly in line with the $1.16 billion estimated by 22 analysts polled by Reuters, using figures derived from nonstandard accounting rules. Alibaba’s revenue rose 54 percent, to $2.7 billion, better than the $2.6 billion estimate of 27 analysts polled by Reuters.

Alibaba also reported net profit using generally accepted accounting principles of $494 million, a drop of 39 percent from the same period a year earlier. The company cited costs related to stock awards before its listing and acquisition-related expenses.

Alibaba’s chief financial officer, Maggie Wei Wu, said the company would not disclose guidance for its future earnings because it wanted to focus on the long term.

The twin drivers of Alibaba’s growth are its Taobao Marketplace and Tmall sites. Taobao, which facilitates the sale of goods from small merchants to consumers, is larger than Tmall, but analysts expect Tmall to eventually eclipse it as Chinese consumers become wealthier and buy products from larger brands. On Tmall, larger companies and multinationals set up their own stores to sell to the huge number of consumers who visit the site.

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Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder. Now with a market value of almost $250 billion, Alibaba is worth more than Facebook.CreditLucy Nicholson/Reuters

Jonathan Lu, Alibaba’s chief executive, said that another point of growth for the company would come from China’s less developed and rural regions. He said that only 9 percent of China’s still immense rural population used e-commerce.

“Our vision is to enable farmers to sell products to city people and globally,” he said. “At the same time, we encourage China’s 600 million farmers to buy online from Taobao.”

Chinese are also increasingly using smartphones to gain access to the Internet in place of computers, and some analysts have worried about Alibaba’s ability to continue to attract users. Though Alibaba has a number of standout smartphone applications, in mobile it remains in the shadow of its rival Tencent, which runs a popular messaging and social networking application called WeChat. Tencent has been striving to make use of the app to sell goods to consumers and has a partnership with Alibaba’s closest e-commerce competitor in China, JD.com.

Analysts have been cheered by the quick growth in the percentage of Alibaba’s transactions carried out on smartphones, though the company’s smartphone presence will continue to be watched closely. Mr. Tsai, the executive vice chairman, said the company had 217 million monthly active users for its mobile e-commerce apps, up from 188 million in the quarter ended in June.

The Forrester analyst Bryan Wang said that just as critical as growth for Alibaba would be controlling costs, which could balloon as the company works to integrate the more than a dozen partnerships it has forged in 2014 alone. Stock in the company closed on Tuesday at $106.07, up 4 percent.

“I’m not so worried about growth. Growth will slow down, probably in the next couple of quarters,” Mr. Wang said. “That will be fine. The key is to make sure costs don’t go up, because when you make so many investments, integration costs rise, and they need to make sure these investments benefit them.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Alibaba Earnings Strong in Report After Offering. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe